In the world of utility service providers such as, but not limited to, electric companies, service disruptions are resolved by a customer contacting the company. More specifically, determination of the exact location of a service outage is often accomplished by asking the customer via a telephone call where they are located. Typically, only customers can report an outage, and they are required to call the utility and give their name, account number, or service address. Operational issues related to the utility service such as an outage, leak, high bill, or any other related issue will also require a significant level of human interaction. Prediction of future operational issues, if done at all, is typically related to high-level weather data alone—e.g., warnings of high wind in advance of hurricane tracking.
Due to the myriad of utility service providers, there also exists a wide variety of outage data in different proprietary formats. Because the information is structured in a proprietary format, there is a difficulty in sharing such data with third parties such as government, first responders, etc. Currently, damage assessment information (e.g., text, photos, location, etc.) is provided via tedious manual processes often involving telephone calls from company employees, first-responders, or customers. Likewise, event coordination among non-employees such as first-responders, employees of another company, or the general public is typically a manual process and varies widely by company.
In terms of determining public sentiment about a particular utility service provider, this is typically accomplished, if at all, by a marketing department using methods such as telephone polling or written surveys. To a limited extent, some use of social media management in this regard exists for example by analytics software provided by Hootsuite Media Inc. of Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Standard telephone interactions between utility service providers and their customers can be problematic for several reasons. For example, processing operational issues via typical telephone reporting presents possible language barriers inherent to verbal communications. This often requires labor intensive human interaction via a phone call, multi-lingual employees, and/or the use of a translation service. Telephone interaction may also trigger an internal, company-driven procedure such as a service restoration action, an audit in response to a high-bill complaint, providing a coupon or credit, or similar business practice. However, processing of such procedure remains based in human interaction between the customer and company representative.
In relation to fraudulent and/or other criminal activity related to operational issues, these sorts of events are typically identified only when a customer calls to complain or when a company employee discovers the problem.
Telephone based reporting often remains limited in context. That is to say, information is currently gathered via a manual process for an entire service territory and service provider responses are usually company-wide, rather than specific to a geographic region.
The advent of computers has given rise to Outage Management System (OMS) tools. An OMS is basically a computer system used by operators of electric distribution systems to assist in restoration of power. However, limitations exist with regard to OMS tools. For example, data entered into an OMS by a call center employee that a particular service address is reporting a power outage may result in the OMS “guessing” where other outages are likely to occur based on the company's existing Geographical Information System (GIS), which explains the physical connectivity of the system. Such “guesses” can often be unreliable especially in a dynamic environment such as a progressing storm or natural disaster. Product and service providers of traditional OMS tools include: General Electric Company of Schenectady, N.Y., USA; Siemens AG of Berlin, Germany; Ventyx, an ABB Ltd. Company of Zurich, Switzerland, Telvent, a Schneider Electric Company of Seville, Spain; Harris Computer Corporation of Nepean, Ontario, Canada; and Intergraph Corporation of Madison, Ala., USA.
As mentioned, many of these solutions are based on a manual, telephonic interaction with a customer (meaning, a customer must call the company for the company to know there is an issue). Furthermore, the aforementioned solutions do not use social media as an operational tool, nor do they use online news feeds, or other data set to identify, categorize, and assist with determining the appropriate response. It would be advantageous to obviate or mitigate this and the above mentioned disadvantages.